Category Archives: Security

One thing that is sometimes overlooked on firewalls is the connection count. Badly written applications or incorrect firewall configurations can mean that the connections table becomes saturated, causing disconnections, connection failures and a myriad of other problems. This can result in people running tests, seeing packet loss, and concluding that there must be a duplex mismatch, erroring link, or something else fundamental along the path.

On a side node, one of the painful situations that causes this on Checkpoint is someone adjusting the TCP timeout value in global properties to something way above the default. TCP timeouts on Checkpoint should ALWAYS be done on the service object level, NOT globally.

We can monitor the connection tables on firewalls via NNMi and generate alerts and also affect the node status (colour) on node maps to help us find these problems.

This article will cover Nokia Checkpoint and Cisco ASA Firewalls as an example, but it can easily be replicated for any firewall by using a different OID for the number of concurrent connections.

Firstly, ensure that you have loaded the MIBs for your firewalls (CHECKPOINT-MIB for Nokias and/or the CISCO-FIREWALL-TC and CISCO-UNIFIED-FIREWALL-MIB for ASA)

Secondly, for all Nokia Checkpoint firewalls, you MUST run cpconfig, and enable the SNMP extension. Bear in mind that you will need to restart checkpoint services with cp restart which is disruptive!

Now, we must create Node Groups for monitoring our firewalls. I suggest that you create node groups that define members by SysOID, as each model/configuration of firewall will have a different limit to the maximum amount of concurrent connections allowed. Low, Mid and Top-end groups are a good idea so you can define a reasonably granular threshold for each group. You should consult the vendor documents to decide on what is appropriate for your environment.

Clicking on the right hand side of MIB Variable lets us drill down the MIB tree to the OID we want. In this case, it’s 1.3.6.1.4.1.2620.1.1.25.3) – fwNumConn. For ASAs, you want 1.3.6.1.4.1.9.9.491.1.1.1.6.

This gives us the following:

We now create a Custom Poller Policy (The 25000 here suggests devices that have a maximum of 25K connections limit, but you could call it anything you like, such as “Low-End-CP-Firewalls-25K-MAX”). From here, we create a new collection policy (see right hand side of image below). We select “Generate incident” on Node collection to generate incidents when the threshold is breached, and we also select “Affect Node Status”, since connection count being over threshold is going to impact performance.

If using NPS, export the collection. You may also prefer to change the “Incident Source Object” to “Custom node Collection” rather than “Custom Polled Instance” as instances tend to work better for multiple objects within the same OID such as BGP peerings.

And then define a threshold… This should be a bit below the maximum amount of supported connections for the group of devices you are monitoring. Eg: for a 25K connections device, select 20000.

Now, back in the Custom poller policy form, we can assign our Node Group. EG: Checkpoint_LowEnd_Firewalls (a node group that includes IP260/IP290 and selects nodes by SysOIDs )

Once all forms are saved, we can verify this is working by navigating to Monitoring > Custom Polled Instances.

This configuration means that firewalls that are added to the topology will automatically fall into the correct node groups and alerting thresholds. It also means that the map will change when the threshold is breached. Split the node groups down as much as you want, but bear in mind that you will have to create a new polling policy/collection+threshold for each group.

It should also be noted that in NNMi, if you adjust a threshold, the collection policy will be suspended and you will have to re-enable it. Don’t let this catch you out!

You may find that keeping an eye on this particular aspect of your firewalls may save you some real headaches later on.